The Old College Try

Updated Oct. 6, 2000 12:01 a.m. ET

Too bad for our nation's college presidents that they aren't graded on a curve. Because when a group of trade-minded scholars took a look at how they were responding to the "anti-sweatshop" movements on their campuses, the result was a big fat "F."

The group is the Academic Consortium on International Trade, a collection of trade lawyers and academic economists including the University of Chicago's Nobel-winning Robert Lucas. In addition to taking issue with the economics behind the increasingly fevered...